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Blocked Fuel Line Botched Military Satellite Orbit
Hugh Pickens writes "Dan Elliott reports that a piece of cloth inadvertently left in the fuel line during the manufacturing process may be the reason for the botched delivery to orbit of a military communications satellite that hasn't reached its planned orbit since it was launched in August. The Air Force Space Command and the contractor, Lockheed Martin, have devised a work-around plan using the remaining propulsion systems — reaction engine assemblies and electric Hall Current Thrusters drawing off of onboard fuel—to slowly raise the perigee of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite until it reaches its intended orbit 22,300 miles over the Earth in October, but the GAO says that the $12.9 billion satellite system incurred at least $250 million in extra costs and a two-year delay because of quality problems due to poor workmanship, undocumented and untested manufacturing processes, poor control of those processes and materials and failure to prevent contamination, poor part design, design complexity, and an inattention to manufacturing risks. John Pike of Globalsecurity.org, which monitors defense issues, says the two-year delay is a bigger problem than the extra expense. 'You've got a lot of other things depending on the launch,' says Pike, including ground-based weapons."
And people whine about NASA being ineffective and costly for putting two landers on a distant planet for the "enormous price" of half a billion of dollars.
$12.9B for yet another military satellite for a Pentagon/CIA that doesn't detect or protect us from attacks that murder Americans and destroy our security, even though the GAO already knows the money was spent on incompetents.
$TRILLIONS in cuts to your Social Security pension that you paid into from your paychecks your whole working life. To protect the $TRILLIONS wasted on the Pentagon/CIA.
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make install -not war
No, it's the $12.9B we gave the Pentagon/CIA for a piece of junk that doesn't work due to contractor incompetence that's stirring up shit, and rightly so.
Don Rumsfeld, is that you?
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make install -not war
The Air Force Space Command and the contractor, Lockheed Martin...
And what penalties is Lockheed Martin going to pay for the shoddy workmanship and untested processes? Will they have to reimburse the government for the expense? Lose their ability to bid on government contracts?
When there's no accountability, there's no incentive to fix anything.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
That's a nice soundbite, and thus guaranteed to get you modded up - but it's wrong. Everybody bids on the same contract, and part of that contract are the monitoring/QA processes and standards.
Have you ever looked at a government contract? They almost never go to the lowest bidder. In fact many specifically state that price will not be considered unless you fall outside of the budget range which is stated in the requirements. You are mixing up road construction with defense spending.
Get a web developer
The problem with that "answer" is that the contract has to completely cover *every possible loophole* or you get reamed. Quality depends more on the people you hire than the processes you follow anyways (though I'm not saying that good processes can't help a lot).
Of course I have. Worked in state government for five years. Helped beat up a number of vendors who thought they could overcharge because it was the state.
Maybe we could use the shuttle to go capture it and move it into it's proper orbit.
AEHF is a system of four satellites, I think, not just one, but nevertheless, I completely agree with what you're saying re: JWST. It's crazy.
Interestingly, AEHF is a military communications system with data rates up to 8Mbit/s from an orbit of 22,000 miles, while JWST has a data rate in excess of 10Mbit/s from L2, i.e. just under a million miles. The comparison is completely specious, I realise (just think about the size of the comms antennae involved, uplink vs downlink, and so on), but amuses me nonetheless :-)
The whole reason we overspend on contractors is so mistakes don't occur. When they do there's rarely a good excuse, so it's no longer a mistake- it's generally due to negligence or corruption. That doesn't fall under the category of "shit happens."
AEHF is designed to be LPI and jam resilient. JWST's downlink isn't.
The problem with your "answer" is that the military lets hundreds of contracts a year - and has been letting high tech and satellite contracts for better than half a century... So the loopholes are pretty well covered. Not to mention, the people hired (Lockheed in this instance) have built plenty of quality products over the years and have quite a bit of experience in their field.
So, once again, this is a nice soundbite and has a high chance of being modded up - but it's not really connected with the facts or history.
Sorry for the AC, but I actually work for Lockheed Martin.
The problem with defense contracting in the United States is, the government itself has created this system and we reap what we have sown. I'm not saying contractors always do right and aren't to blame for situations like this. Quite the contrary.
But the whole way the system works needs a major overhaul. For instance, we're awarded contracts to produce systems. Costs are already astronomical because the government places extremely costly requirements on process and all kinds of other things that may or may not make the products better. The levels of bureaucracy are mind boggling. And you've heard the term "nanny state", well, that's nothing compared to the type of involvement the government has in these programs.
People think the government says, "we need a satellite" and then a while later, we build one and they cut us a check. It doesn't work like that at all. There are contract award fees and admittedly, I'm an engineer and I don't fully understand how the finances work, but we're constantly trained on proper time recording because those hours are billed to the government. Sounds nice until you consider this: what would you do if you walked into Home Depot to buy an appliance or something and they started talking about billing hours to you? You'd run out of there at a full sprint. So why is it that we're not just making products and selling them at a fixed price? In other words, why are we not saying, "we made this system, if you want it, it costs $75 million", or whatever the prices is?
This is how cost overruns happen. What would happen if some appliance manufacturer, in bringing a new dishwasher to market, had technical challenges, manufacturing problems, labor issues, whatever, such that when it hit the market, it cost $50,000? They wouldn't sell one. Now, take it a step further and say you went into the store and pre-ordered one before these issues and while this stuff is happening, they're billing you for hours and moving the completion date and things like that? This is the way defense contracting works, not because we asked for this system, but because this is the way the government has run the system. When GM puts a car on the lot at a dealer, there's a price tag on it based on what it's worth, not based on cost-overruns during R&D. Sure, they need to price things in a way that will recoup that development cost, but they have to balance that with what will move vehicles.
The basic point is, contractors deserve some blame, but ultimately, the lesson is that government cannot and will not efficiently develop anything of its own. If you think that taking the work out of the hands of contractors and just making it a government enterprise will change anything, you are sadly mistaken. The contractors are the beast that has sprung up out of the system because of the way the system works, not because contractors are somehow greedy and evil. Contrary to popular belief, there is a general desire to do good work and to put out products to be proud of, not some concerted effort to pull the wool over people's eyes and to milk the government for all it's worth. Yes, there examples of bad behavior on contractors' parts, and we are to blame for those things, but the system allows that stuff to happen without sufficient consequence.
When there's no accountability, there's no incentive to fix anything.
Here's how I'd run government: "When the satellite reaches proper orbit and tests out, you'll get the first 80% of the $12.4B. When it's operational for a year, you'll get the remainder.
A decent mix of investors, lenders, and insurance would allow this kind of project, yet every player would demand excellent quality.
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